Nail Gun Massacre, d. Terry Lofton and Bill Leslie (1985)
Martin Scorsese recently opined that Marvel Universe movies were ‘not cinema’. He’s right on his own terms, but
he’s also dead wrong. Like most highly technical processes, Cinema grew out of
commerce rather than art. Early films are all spectacle: look, there’s a train;
look, there’s the sea; look, there’s people leaving a factory. As you might
expect, this quickly found its way into sideshows and fairgrounds, pop up
cinemas with a mission to enthrall and entertain in exchange for cold, hard
cash. The first few years of film is all about the novelty of moving pictures,
about capturing landscapes, faces and, then, jokes and stunts and condensed adaptations
of popular stories and historical events. It’s to this tradition that the Marvel
Universe belongs and as such, it could be argued it represents pure, raw
cinema: it mesmerises by kinetic action and light and movement – it enthralls
and entertains.
Scorsese’s argument seems to
centre around Cinema as an art form, the use of the medium by auteurs who are
able to use it as an instrument of personal (or universal) expression. This makes
sense, and we can all reference a number of deeply profound films that really
say something about the human experience or, at least, say something to us. But
not all films are like this, and not all films need to be. Scorcese has made
some fairly unprofound films, and Francis Ford Coppola (who also waded into the
argument) hasn’t made anything of any note since 1982. Dismissing populist
cinema is like dismissing popular music: it misses the point, especially as
great pop and great pop cinema can also be great art, not only on their own terms,
but in general.
I’m happy to live in a world that
encompasses both the popular and the artistic and all points between, and I don’t rate one higher than the other. Film is like music, like art, like soap: use it for what
you need, get from it what you will. Which brings us to Nail Gun Massacre, a film that harks back to
the early, primitive days of cinema. In it, a disguised figure massacres
people - with a nail gun. This happens perhaps 15 times, and doesn’t get old at
all. The victims aren’t really victims, but construction workers who raped a young
woman, i.e. scumbags who need nailing to trees, to walls, to roads. But the
killer deviates from his revenge to also kill passers by, including young women
who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, which seems counterproductive enough to skew the
message completely but, hey, this is a film about a nail gun
massacre, so perhaps I’m getting a little too Scorsese on it.
This film works only as
spectacle. Characters are very briefly introduced, and, before we get to know
their names and their motivation, a wraith like figure, identity obscured, kills
them with a nail gun, makes some execrable pun and then makes their escape. Cut
to the next character(s), and the next killing. When a death free patch of ten
minutes or so emerges later in the narrative, they fill it with nothing,
culminating in a sex scene. These people aren’t interested in characterisation,
in narrative, even in atmosphere or tension, they just want to show people
being massacred with a nail gun. In this sense, the film is an enormous success.
Is it cinema? It’s more than that, it’s the distilled essence of cinema, loaded into
an pneumatic industrial tool and fired at the viewer at 24 frames and 5 nails
per second.